If the marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the best of the material you can produce. Here are several suggestions to help you use the two most commonly produced types of legal marketing content as effectively as you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have created any quality, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You should distribute that content as broadly as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it directly to people who have referred me, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked to it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Is everyone in the company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing them gets only a one time presentation. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may feel like more work just when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to remember that it is much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create content you will feel more positive about how effective the results will be.
John Gray is a practising lawyer and the Senior Marketer at John Gray Marketing, an Australian specialist law firm and legal marketing consultancy. If you are interested in law marketing, legal marketing and marketing for lawyers, contact John Gray today.